Flexible and adaptable models must be developed to ensure broad access and choice. Health service teams must adapt their operations to meet the unique needs of adolescents and other underserved groups.

Last month, I visited Goudoubo camp in Burkina Faso with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Here I met Malian refugees who fled their country after conflict broke out in the North in early 2012. There are over 34,000 Malian refugees in Burkina Faso - most of whom are from northern Mali.

I therefore think it may be time to reconsider the gap between the impact that development initiatives can have and the impact that evaluations measure. One way to start may be by letting people targeted by development initiatives speak just as loudly as numbers and statistics.

What can't be emphasised too strongly here is that these are analyses of real deaths and actual weather. They are not simulations or models - and it reflects the great strength of the INDEPTH Network that it is possible to analyse factual information in this way from parts of the world where reliable data are usually in short supply.

There are no proper words to describe the heartbreaking sight of a malnourished child. No image on TV can prepare you for the sheer lightness of their bodies, their minuscule wrists, their over-sized, slightly bulging heads; the breathtaking shock of realising that the cute baby who looks newborn is actually nearly two years old. Malnourishment is not something that enters our world very often. Ours is a place where 60 stone teenagers must be hoisted out of their homes by the local fire service because they no longer fit through their front doors. It's a place where five-year-old girls worry themselves silly about being thinner, aspiring to a 'body ideal' that's estimated to be not physically achievable by 95% of the population.

I've long thought that the editors of our international media (and the British media is a particular culprit) needs to start noticing Africa. Not just the coups and the food crises and the droughts, but also the positive stories, the African success stories that are putting, for example, Ghana amid the fast growing nations in the world.